This wonderful selection of essays via scientist and nationwide e-book Award-winning author Lewis Thomas is still startlingly suitable for state-of-the-art global. Luminous, witty, and provocative, the essays handle such issues as "The Attic of the mind, " "Falsity and Failure, " "Altruism, " and the results of the federal government's digital abandonment of aid for easy medical examine may have on medication and technological know-how. Profoundly and powerfully, Thomas questions the folly of nuclear weaponry, displaying that t brainpower and funds spent in this activity are wanted even more urgently for the fundamental technological know-how we have now abandoned--and that even medicine's so much complex approaches will be dead or inadequate within the face of the smallest nuclear detonation. And within the identify essay, he addresses himself with terrifying poignancy to the query of what it's wish to be younger within the nuclear age.

In Eye of My middle, twenty-seven shrewdpermanent, gutsy writers explode myths and stereotypes and inform the complete loopy, advanced fact approximately being a grandmother in contemporary global. one of the members: Anne Roiphe learns—the tough way—to preserve her mouth close and her reviews to herself. Elizabeth Berg marvels at witnessing her baby provide start to her baby.

Approximately as worldwide in its ambition and sweep as its topic, Franco Moretti's the unconventional is a watershed occasion within the figuring out of the 1st really planetary literary shape. A translated choice from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo (2001-2003), The Novel's volumes are a unified multiauthored reference paintings, containing multiple hundred in particular commissioned essays through prime modern critics from around the globe.

Dale Welland flew to Mexico to flee banks, embezzlers, and the vacancy of his condo after his female friend moved out. He selected town of l. a. Paz as the identify intended peace, and while a stranger named Brent Markesson provided to take him crusing on a ship named some distance Reacher, Dale believed he'd stumbled on the peach he used to be searching for.

Catie Marron’s urban Parks captures the spirit and sweetness of eighteen of the world’s most-loved urban parks. Zadie Smith, Ian Frazier, Candice Bergen, Colm Tóibín, Nicole Krauss, Jan Morris, and a dozen different notable members contemplate a selected park that holds unique which means for them. Andrew Sean Greer eloquently paints a portrait of old flame within the Presidio; André Aciman muses on time’s fleeting nature and the altering face of latest York seen from the excessive Line; Pico Iyer explores hidden locations and privateness in Kyoto; Jonathan regulate takes readers from the 1968 race riots to Obama’s 2008 victory speech in Chicago’s provide Park; Simon Winchester invitations us alongside on his adventures within the Maidan; and invoice Clinton writes of his affection for Dumbarton Oaks.

Extra resources for Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony

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Meanwhile, our com­ petitors in Europe and Japan have long since found effective 26 Lewis Thomas ways to link industrial research to government and aca­ demic science, and they may be outclassing this country before long. In some fields, most conspicuously the devising and production of new scientific instruments, they have al­ ready moved to the front. There are obvious difficulties in the behavior of the tradi­ tional worlds of research in the United States. Corporate research is obliged by its nature to concentrate on profitable products and to maintain a high degree of secrecy during the process; academic science, by its nature, must be car­ ried out in the open and depends for its progress on the free exchange of new information almost at the moment of find­ ing.

They can be killed only by chilling them down in boiling water. And yet they look just like ordinary bacteria. Under the electron microscope they have the same essential struc­ ture— cell walls, ribosomes, and all. If they were, as is now being suggested, the original archebacteria, ancestors of us all, how did they or their progeny ever learn to cool down? I cannot think of a more wonderful trick. My Number Three Wonder is oncideres, a species of beetle encountered by a pathologist friend of mine who lives in Houston and has a lot of mimosa trees in his back­ yard.

To be sure, the horse couldn’t really do arithme­ tic, but the record shows that he was considerably better at observing human beings and interpreting their behavior than humans are at comprehending horses or, for that mat­ ter, other humans. Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists want­ ing to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an inscrutable mystery, beyond human reach, the least human of all creatures and at the same time, as any cat owner will attest, the most intelligent.